Priorities
by EmDrenn
Summary: On a mission, Sakura finds her way to a small village on the border, and because of that, Orochimaru's base. What she finds deep down in the cellars of this forgotten place are the embodiment of all she used to love and all she's come to hate. Oneshot.


The room she was in held the sour smell of a geriatric wing back at the hospital in Konoha, as well as about four-hundred dead rats. She held her fingers to cover the two small nose holes in her bird shaped ANBU mask, the ventilation mask under her own ANBU one was not keeping away all the smell of decay like she had been told it would.

'_Defective piece of junk,'_ she thought with a displeased look in her eyes.

She timidly wondered what it would smell like without the protection at all. She mentally gagged at the thought and decided not to bring it up ever again.

The cellar was dark, damp, and had nothing that she could see to bring light to her situation. She kept her mouth covered with her left hand and raised her right hand as she made a small one-handed seal, her hand quietly erupted with visibly green chakra. Stumbling slightly less, she traveled further down into the cellar, the smell getting worse and worse as she made her way down the stairs.

'_At least i know I'm going in the right direction,'_ she thought with a grimace.

After a few moments of slow travel she became aware of a strange sound, like a moaning ghost Naruto would mimic in his old ghost stories. She furrowed her brows, wondering what it could be.

It was too dark, too cramped, the room felt stuffy. She really wished she'd bothered to ask Sasuke how to do a fire jutsu before he ended up running away and getting his body stolen by a freak. She shook her head, beating away any thought of getting any sort of help from him.

Darn it all, this really sucked.

She heard the moaning again, it was definitely human, probably male. Fanning her chakra out without another thought, she sent strings of chakra in every direction, along the walls, climbing whatever it touched. It wasn't exactly an Uchiha-brand fire jutsu, but it would have to do. Soon the room was enveloped in an inhuman green glow, like an ominously lit laboratory.

And that's exactly what it was, the further and further she fanned out her chakra, the bigger and bigger the room began. Soon it was as big as the room she'd fought with Yamanaka Ino in the Chunin Exams. There were large glass tubes filled with strange liquids, each of which contained some sort of mutated life form. One in particular caught her attention, a small boy whose skin was completely black, like ink. He had four arms and something resembling a tail sticking out of his backside. What had Orochimaru been doing down here? She gagged slightly as she saw some of the other more tasteless experiments.

Bodies completely inside out. Conjoined life forms between humans and animals. Humans with four heads, no eyes, three mouths, seventeen webbed digits per hand. You name it, he had it. One tube held a girl with her brain on the outside of her head, Sakura realized with cruel realization she was the girl whom had led her to the fortress a few days ago in her search for Sasuk- no, Orochimaru.

She tied a strip of cloth around the middle of her mask around her head so both of her hands could be free without her passing out from the phenomenal smell, suddenly feeling more on edge as the moaning started up again, she whipped out a kunai.

She finally saw the source of the moaning, an adult figure in a black cloak sat against the wall, his body violently shivering. She blinked and slowly walked over, kneeling down a few feet in front of him.

"Excuse me…" She ventured guardedly, staring down at the figure in black. He had long black messy hair, and his skin… His skin was a sickly pale color, she couldn't see his face. His left hand held against his forehead like he had a headache, but his right arm was crawling around on its fingers like it had a mind of its own. It continued to venture further around the ground, patting at the floor until it found what it was looking for, it gripped it tightly and Sakura hissed at the man, slightly confused.

"Sir, put down your weapon," she said sternly. The man gripped at his forehead more tightly, groaning even louder. He shook his head as if to clear his thoughts, Sakura took it as a refusal to coöperate.

"Sir, put down your weapon, or I'll be forced to arrest you for resistance towards a ninja of Konoha."

The figure either didn't hear or didn't care; he gripped the short sword tightly and pointed it at her, the rest of his body was completely unaware of its right arm, it couldn't have been normal, the movement was just too separated. She's read of something like this. Alien Hand Syndrome, a mental illness where the right and left side of the brain are completely disconnected through some sort of head trauma or from birth, one side of the body was completely independent from the other.

The man lifted his head and Sakura gasped.

It was Sasuke, but she knew it wasn't really Sasuke, it was Orochimaru in Sasuke's body. But it was strange because-

The man frowned a familiar frown of recognition.

"That dumb pink hair…," he chucked dryly.

"Sakura… what the hell are-?" His voice cut off as he started up in a fit of painful coughs, he hunched over, covering his mouth with his hand. She saw some blood cover his hand.

Suddenly he looked up to see the other arm holding the knife, with his left hand he quickly subdued the arm, keeping it tight against his right thigh, the arm struggled momentarily before the sword clattered to the ground with a sharp clanging sound, the arm laid still. Sakura couldn't believe what she was seeing.

Sasuke's (Orochimaru's?) left eye was glowing a crimson red with the activated Sharingan, the right was cat-like in appearance, large, and orange the eye of Orochimaru. The tear ducts in that eye had reacted severely, flaming red and bruising as if infected. saline tears like rivers had made paths on his dirty face, but Sasuke barely seemed to notice.

What was this? She wondered in horrid fascination. The man in front of her suddenly convulsed violently, the skin on his face seemed to bubble and churn just under the surface, she gasped, reaching forward slightly before thinking better of it. She took a few steps backward.

She frowned, realizing what was going on.

Sasuke was rejecting Orochimaru's body. He was fighting him by the looks of it, seeing as Orochimaru wasn't in total control, it seemed Orochimaru only had one hand to his name at the moment. Sasuke was winning.

Sasuke was desperate, voice rough. "Sakura, you need to leave n-" his eyes bulged and then he clenched them as if in pain. Then suddenly both eyes flashed bright orange as they snapped open, a terribly familiar smirk spreading across his face made Sakura shudder underneath her ANBU mask, the white face of a sparrow with a protruding beak.

The hand with the sword suddenly raised up as he too slid up to face her, she stepped back, grabbing another kunai from her side pouch. Sakura wanted to shake her head, to cry out, to flinch away from this monster before her, to reject in some way the sense of tragedy and loss welling up within her, but she couldn't, or Orochimaru would take the chance to kill her.

'_Don't look at me like that with his face…No.'_

"Hello…Sakura…" Orochimaru hissed, she couldn't help it, she flinch, and the Snake sneered. His voice was a mix of both the Sasuke she had once thought of as a potential love, and the Orochimaru she'd come to see in her darkness nightmares; A low tenor, and a sickly sweet high tone that mixed like the discordant theme of some too real nightmare.

'_You knew this was going to happen Sakura, yet you came anyways- you came,'_ She gulped, standing up straight and filling her hands with her chakra, and forcing the chakra to extend past her fingertips, like talons, making them the deadly weapons they were. She clenched her kunai in-between her fingers. The rubber in her gloves made a small noise as she stretched them.

For Konoha, kill Orochimaru. For the Sandaime, kill him. For Naruto, kill him. For Sasuke, as he had been.

"In the name of the Hidden village of the leaf, Konoha village. Orochimaru-," She charged him, he raised his sword to parry her. Their weapons made a sharp noise as they made contact with one another. She brought her left hand up, chakra enveloping it like a blade. Sasuke, no, Orochimaru's tongue extended, serpentine and tactile to wrap around Sakura's wrist but managed to slice through it enough to force it up underneath her and Orochimaru's momentary stalemate and through Orochimaru's diaphragm.

"Please die." She heard the small torrent of blood spill out on the other side, she didn't flinch.

It didn't matter that Sasuke was alive. Orochimaru was alive too, and Orochimaru's death took precedence over Sasuke's life. She was an ANBU of Konoha after all. She also had to believe that Sasuke would have wanted her to end his misery, under the control of that freak. He'd never believed in answering to anyone, not even her.

Orochimaru's face registered one of shock as his guffaw of surprise quickly turned to an expression riddled with pain as he felt her hand go through his abdomen, his organs, and latch onto his spine. He grinned as blood seeped down the side of his lip and his long tongue snaked out of his mouth, quickly wrapping itself around Sakura's neck. She yanked her hand back out of his stomach- blood splattered noisily and her skin chilled as the blood hit the air and tried to cut the tongue with a kunai, but no luck. Orochimaru's open mouth taunted her as he grinned that freakishly confident grin. She grimaced, increasing the amount of energy in her palm and with a violent thrust, she forced her hand down his throat.

Orochimaru promptly exploded.


End file.
